The five stages - denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance - are a part of the framework that makes up our learning to live with the one we lost. They are tools to help us frame and identify what we may be feeling. But they are not stops on some linear timeline in grief.
The day after Britain voted to leave the European Union, I woke up determined to make a success of Brexit. I was surprised by how quickly I went to acceptance of the result, without passing through any of the prior stages of grief.
Denial helps us to pace our feelings of grief. There is a grace in denial. It is nature's way of letting in only as much as we can handle.
First, there is no typical grief cycle, and second, it's not something I went through. I'm still grieving.
Like the pain of a bad wound, the effect of a deep shock takes some while to be felt. When a child is told, for the first time in his life, that a person he has known is dead, although he does not disbelieve it, he may well fail to comprehend it and later ask--perhaps more than once--where the dead person is and when he is coming back.
Any natural, normal human being, when faced with any kind of loss, will go from shock all the way through acceptance.
A person doesn't mourn forever.
The process of grief has a beginning a middle and an end. The hard part is holding on in the middle. You can hold on. There's transformation happening in these times bringing you to a new place. It's a place you can only get to through the pain.
Grief, as I read somewhere once, is a lazy Susan. One day it is heavy and underwater, and the next day it spins and stops at loud and rageful, and the next day at wounded keening, and the next day numbness, silence.
